Boarding in Toronto at 1:30 am, our request for “leg room” led immediately to a ticket upgrade from economy to “deluxe economy.” On the 767 (?) that meant of the four distinct classes of travel, we were above the jam packed “economy” class – more leg room, fancy TVs that pop out of arm rests, and meals at odd times. There were two “higher” classes than that, each with bigger, wider seats and presumably more perks. Curtains separated each area, so what was happening in the higher classes remained a mystery. (They try to adjust you to Taiwan time – exactly 12 hours difference – by serving meals when you would eat them in Taiwan. Thus, a full meal (beef or chicken) with potatoes, veg and dessert was served almost immediately, at about 2:30 am Toronto time.) Since the entire trip took place at night, the 15-hour plane ride quickly took on a surreal tint — sleep when you can, eat when it’s offered, and enjoy a selection of films including “Timeless Classics” that were Brother Bear, Unbreakable, Enchanted and National Treasure. I decided to go with The Men Who Stare At Goats while Sam rocked The Lovely Bones. Both were disappointing. But “deluxe economy” was swank, tons of leg room, nice wide seats, and only a handful of screaming 3-year-olds. But after a while – with no sunlight, no sense of how time is passing, and landing in the dark at 5 am in Taiwan, the whole thing took on a slightly dream-like tint.

We arrived not in Taipei itself, but at the airport about one hour south of the city. Immediate impressions were that it was very clean — eerily spotless clean. Actually, the first impressions were odd English signs advertising things like “advanced cleaning and chewing technology” in teeth care. Also, the symbol of immigration and customs is the “Customs Beagle” — the cutest little guy warning us that these immigration beagles are stationed throughout, sniffing out contraband. I secretly wished that I would be taken in to be interrogated by an immigration beagle. Maybe a pair of them would play good beagle, bad beagle to get us to confess. Hopefully photos of immigration beagle will be acquired on the trip back.

At the airport we met with Sherry and Thomas, our guides on this particular trip. Sherry is Taiwanese, Thomas is Chinese, and they’ve both lived in Vancouver for at least 15 years. Sherry makes regular trips back (about once a year); Thomas, who emigrated with his family when he was 7, has been to Taiwan four times.

The first thing you notice – other than the ridiculously spotless airport – is the dominance of Western brands. We cabbed to the bullet train station, where we had a couple of hours to kill before making the trek to the southern part of the island. At the train station, the only two open stores were a 7-11 (apparently now owned by an Asian company, and extremely common here), and a Starbucks. We stopped for a Starbucks coffee – and it was better than any recent Starbucks experience I’ve had. When more restaurants had opened, we had breakfast at Mos Burger, a Taiwanese burger chain that seemed to only serve variations on chicken burger. The logo for Mos Burger is a giant burger talking on the phone. Photos will be required of that one too. Sam ate a chicken and seafood burger on rice patties, while I had an orange chicken burger; they’re small, like sliders or White Castle burgers.

Then it’s on to the bullet train, where I’m writing this now. Sam has never been on a train – like, at all. Not a via train, not a Go train, the subway is the nearest train experience he’s had. Now we’re on one of the most high-tech trains in the world; we’ll travel about 1.5 hours at speeds upwards of 200 km an hour. (The train display is supposed to indicate the speed, but I haven’t seen that yet – at least glancing up occasionally from my computer.) The landscape is mountainous, full of rice paddies and occasional small-ish cities. Modern architecture is interspersed with traditional buildings, and while Taiwan has a very large population for a small island (all of Taiwan is about the size of Vancouver island, housing a population of about 30 million people), but this train ride is showcasing quite a bit of green space, mountains, and tons of rice paddies.

Our first train stop was a the “silicon valley” of Taiwan, a lot of high tech companies, but nothing (from the train) would seem to indicate that.

Once we arrived via bullet train, we took a two-hour van ride to our swank luxury resort hotel; the first thing we see outside is three lambourinis (not gonna bother looking up how to spell that) along with a slew of other super-fancy cars. They would make an appearance, we’d discover, later in the evening. But that’s a tale for another blog entry, coming soon.

Kenting – the site of several music festivals we’re checking out here – is a small resort town on the southern tip of Taiwan – Taipei, the capital and largest city, is the northernmost city. Several folks have described it as the Mexico of Taiwan – the resort destination for much of Asia. It is indeed beautiful, with a lovely white sand private beach. Once we arrived and got ourselves settled, it was once again time to eat – which we seem to be doing every two hours since the moment we took off from Toronto. Despite a few hours sleep on the plane, Sam and I are totally confused in terms of our body clocks, but we decide to just go with it. That’s our approach to food as well – just go with the adventure that presents itself to us. At lunch, that means pig intestines and pigs blood in gelatin, which was on the spicy side. Our hosts seem thrilled that we’re willing to try anything, and “stinky tofu” seems to be high on that list. We’ll discover that later.

After a quick nap – during which time Sam is checking out masters for his band Junior Battles, who are putting out a split seven-inch with O Pioneers – it’s off to music fest!

There isn’t just one music festival here this weekend, there are six or seven, with different focuses. The Taiwan cultural association that is hosting us have a list of bands they want us to check out – we were sent music in advance, along with brief bio information. Some of those bands are playing the Spring Wave – the festival for more mainstream, established Taiwanese bands here. We’re a little more excited about the Spring Scream – the 200 band, seven-stage festival for more “indie” acts – but decide to at least start at the Spring Wave to see a couple of bands that we might have an opportunity to interview later this week in Taipei.

We are accompanied at every turn by four people from the Vancouver cultural association – we’re told that if we did not have them as guides, there would be a government official assigned to us for the duration of our stay; they would shadow us everywhere. Because we have our Taiwanese hosts, the government waved that requirement, but our “credentials” for the trip are issued by the Government Information Office. (GIO.) They say “Visiting Journalist.”

The southern tip here is extremely windy, and the fest takes place in a fairly dusty field on the ocean. The first thing we notice is a giant foam ear at the entrance. We take photos.

No foam finger, but giant foam ear.

Attendees at the fest notice us too – there’s not a huge Western presence in this town, so a six-foot-four beardy white guy kinda stands out. Within about ten minutes, I’m photographed at least three times with fascinated Taiwanese music fans.

The first band won a fan voting contest to open this festival – the excessive slap-bass is what strikes us immediately. Avril with slap bass is how Sam characterizes it.

The second band is Monkey Pilot, one of the bands that might be coming to Canada in August for the TaiwanFest events in Toronto and Vancouver.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWrmeVut5N4

They sound like half their influences are bands we’d like and half are bands we hate. After a promising first song, they quickly become the Finger 11 of Taiwan. At one point they yell “Rock and roll!” with complete sincerity and the crowd responds in kind. Sam and I realize that it’s been years since we’ve seen a band do that back home, at least without irony. For their final performance, a beautiful woman comes out and sings what is clearly a huge hit with the band and it’s their best song so far. Turns out her name is Sin Je Lee; she’s a Malaysian actress and social activist; I ask if this is the equivalent of Scarlett Johannsen singing with the Jesus and Mary Chain – it is.

While Sam and I contemplate the responsibilities of being open-minded in the face of what is – let’s be honest here – not great musical offerings, we head to the beer tent, itself the strangest item at Spring Wave. First, we appear to be amongst the very few drinking here. There is no line at the beer booth, despite the best beer prices we’ll see so far. (About $1.75 for a half litre.) It’s a Belgian beer company whose name we can’t remember any more. Their corporate logo is a giant beer-drinking baby. (Commercials that run between bands on giant screens make it look like the annoying dancing baby on Ally McBeal a few years back.) Beside the stage is a 12-foot statue of said baby drinking a beer with one hand on his pee-pee.

World's creepiest beer fountain.

It’s a beer fountain – they actually pump draft out the baby’s penis. They offer us a free sample of baby-penis-draft. It’s like a light lager and we proceed to enjoy more of it.

There are also several skimpily dressed young Taiwanese women representing the beer company; on top of what is a very temporary structure (like any festival booth) they dance together holding beer bottles, like go-go dancers on a rickety garage roof. A little later, Sam points out that there’s actually a shower nozzle set up on this second-floor dance booth, which they use to spray the crowd and – probably later in the evening – each other. Which means that they ran plumbing from somewhere to this tiny beer booth in order to set up these showers, which Sam points out have better water pressure than he gets back home. It’s very, very odd.

Next up is a band that I think is called Magic Power; they’re another variation of rap-rock, although this time they seem a little more clued into hip-hop culture than just occasionally rapping over rock riffs. (Read: they actually have a DJ and some sense of flow to their Taiwanese rapping.) Yet the rock influence remains and we realize that many Taiwanese bands simply take all the signifiers of Western acts and adopt them whole, without context. They have a couple of go-go dancers, and some stage pyrotechnics, but they’re also facing into a fairly stiff wind that constantly blows dust in their faces. Their smoke machines dissipate almost immediately, but when the fire pyro starts going off — essentially blowing six-foot flames right into the band members — they carry on without flinching. That’s impressive.

Before Magic Power finish, we’re invited back stage to say hi to Mavis before she takes the stage with her band 100%. Mavis is one of the more interesting stories we’ve heard about — about ten years ago, she was a bubble gum pop star, one of the manufactured music “products” that are prevalent in mainstream Asian music. She was Britney. But after an apparent crisis of identity, she disappeared for a couple of years before reemerging with her band, and a dedication to the “indie” underground in Taiwan. She writes her own music, and wants to control her destiny as an artist, which is unusual. We will hopefully get a chance to interview her when we’re in Taipei in a few days.

When Mavis and 100% take the stage, it’s the first act we’ve seen so far that seem to come from an authentic musical place. Her sound isn’t unfamiliar — she’s working from a similar pop rock template as many Western bands would be — but she’s a good songwriter, a clearly experienced and engaging performer. It’s the best we’ve seen so far.

Questions that occur after this first evening of musical offerings: are we hearing Taiwanese youth culture represented by these bands? Is that present lyrically and we’re just not hearing it? We ask our guides, who respond that it’s a very good question, one they’re not sure they can answer. Sam and I feel a bit like the biggest music snobs on the planet, and a bit like there has to be something more than what we’re seeing at Spring Wave, perhaps at the more indie-oriented Spring Scream around the way.

But before we depart, we enjoy our first taste of “stinky tofu.” It’s fermented, and gives off a waft like a really good stinky cheese. But unlike the way that stinky cheese doesn’t taste stinky, stinky tofu doesn’t really smell that bad but actually tastes stinky. Like feet, but not in an unpleasant way. It tastes like the feet of a loved one.

At about 9 pm, we decide to abandon Spring Wave and try to head across town to catch some late-night Spring Scream action. With heavy traffic, it will take us about an hour to travel what turns out to be a relatively short distance; as soon as we find ourselves in the soothing hum of the van, the fact that, with the exception of a few hours here and there, we’ve been awake for about 36 hours finally hits us and we stumble to the gates of Spring Scream, only to find complications with entry. We abandon this plan for the night, agreeing that we’ll start fresh tomorrow, when we’ll be able to make Spring Scream our only destination for the evening.

On the way home, we ditch the van for a walk through a “night market” – a Taiwanese tradition. It’s a combination food market, carnival and street festival, jammed with people. Food stalls offer everything from splayed squid on a stick to fresh fruits, with pinball and other mini-games. A random guy offers Sam “free water” and hands him a tall can of beer, which we share. Then the parade of lambourginis and other fancy cars we saw earlier at our hotel drives down the strip, and crowds gather to take photos and cheer. Sam and I dub it the “douche parade” — these guys would get showered with beer cans if this sort of display of wealth and pretence occurred back home. The night market also causes me to reassess an earlier impression of the dominance of Western brands. The first thing we saw before boarding the bullet train yesterday was a 7-11 and Starbucks. But in all our travels since, we’ve only seen 7-11 and Starbucks, with very little presence of other Western brands. (There is a McDonalds on the strip, but it’s tiny and not prominent on this mile-long stretch of consumer madness.) We wonder at the BBQ Disco and Show; we’re informed later that a “show” in this context is a strip club. No one explains the BBQ part.

We are not seen, seemingly, as tourist “marks.” In the ways that we’ve experienced when visiting other countries, when Western tourists are treated as a source of economic exploitation, we’re viewed as curiosities but seemingly not more. Perhaps tourists from other parts of Asia — Kenting being a popular tourism destination — are those marks.

By the time we get home, the whole night market seems like a surrealist dream. We finally fall into bed by 10:30 pm Saturday night (which would be 10:30 am Saturday morning by our biological clocks, having departed Toronto late Thursday night). Sleep comes before the hotel room door closes.

Attention, concerned citizens of Vancouver and San Francisco. We have found your lost hippie children! They are illegally teaching English in Taiwan, and spending their Easter weekend doing that stupid hippie dance at the Spring Scream, the 200-band three-day extravaganza that takes place on the southernmost tip of the island.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Having fully recovered from our journey, Sam and I want to embrace the Taiwanese experience, which starts with food, naturally. After an uneventful hotel breakfast – aside from Sam’s unfortunate encounter with too large a chunk of salted tofu – we caught up on our blogging and emails before heading out for lunch at a seafood restaurant on “the strip” nearby.

When Sam's attack!

Neither of us have any particular food qualms, so host Charlie orders up a slew of local delicacies, which include fish skin in gelatin (our personal favourite, a tasty delight), sea snails (a little chewy, and watch out for the hot peppers), fried squid balls, bitter melon with salted eggs (an odd taste until it occurred to me that my default for “eggs” is chicken eggs – these were duck eggs), bamboo shoots, fish eggs and BBQ oyster. Add in some guava juice, plum juice and apple cider and we’re loaded up for a day of rock’n’roll!

So Delicious

Our previous night, we’d made an exhausted and ultimately futile attempt to attend day 1 of the Spring Scream. Arriving plenty early for day 2, our first sight is a gang of Taiwanese youth who dress and act like they should be in a band – Ramones haircuts, swagger, and one’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Brutal Bong Bashing Death.” They would be our favourite band, but alas, they’re just fans. The Spring Scream is actually held within the confines of the Kenting Forest national park, a beautiful locale right on the ocean.

Three stages, plus the ocean.

One thing becomes immediately clear – no Taiwanese music fans will be asking to take photos of us or with us today, because this place is crawling with white hippies. The second thing that becomes immediately clear is that this will be an amazing opportunity to see a whole variety of bands, more than one at a time! There are seven stages spread out across the side of a sloped open field, but the stages are no more than about 150 feet apart. It’s nearly impossible to hear any band without also hearing two others in close proximity, a fact that chafes with some of the music fans we chat with throughout the day. No matter.

We approach a few hippies to get their take on the festival, the Taiwanese music scene, and what brought them here for the weekend; when Sam asks if they’ll talk on camera, most of them demure until we realize that they’re actually here teaching illegally, and don’t want to be filmed. Fair enough. A couple of them point us to a band of Canadian and American ex-pats called New Hong Kong Hair City, who happily agree to be interviewed on camera. They too are English teachers. We chat about the challenges of breaking into the domestic music scene and the fact that there’s a pretty significant glass ceiling in terms of how far a foreign band can go here. We comment on how many Canadians we’ve met already in just a few minutes and they joke that ROC (Republic of China) actually stands of Rest of Canada.

They’re really nice people; when they take the stage a few minutes later, we’re a little disappointed by their brand of “heavy funk,” including what their horn player refers to as “saxophonics.” They’re good players, with a strong Fishbone vibe. Not our thing, and not why we’re here. We move on.

In the middle of the field is a DJ set-up that attracts a slew of dancing, spinning hippies throughout the day; its location kind of dominates the sound of the whole festival, but we quickly find ourselves checking out stages on the outskirts. One fascinating aspect of this particular festival is that with seven stages but no “main” stage, there isn’t the typical big stage/little stage dichotomy that would dominate multi-stage festivals back home. Each band draws a crowd (or not) on its merits, so it becomes relatively easy to find bands that are attracting fans.

Chatting with a few repeat attendees, we find out that this is a new development this year – in previous years, the fest (which was founded 15 years ago by a couple of American expats we hope to interview later) would book a big name Taiwanese headliner, who would appear on a mainstage over the hill from where we are. But what they discovered was that 5,000 people would come to see the headliner, then leave, doing very little to promote the rest of the festival. The festival’s willingness to adapt and evolve with what’s working is fascinating – hopefully next year’s innovation will include putting stages a little further apart.

Using Taiwanese music fans as our guide, Sam and I constantly find ourselves faced with rap-rock, probably the dominant sound of Taiwanese rock bands we’ve seen so far. One Canadian fan points out that Taiwanese music is particularly influenced by the bands who tour here a lot, which Linkin Park has done repeatedly. Sorta like American soldiers in Vietnam who fathered a lot of mixed-race babies before splitting Stateside, Linkin Park has yet to take any responsibility for what they have wrought here. Europe – the band – are also hugely popular, and we find one young band (died orange emo haircuts, not-quite-matching white polo shirts) who’ve really taken to that particular sound. They also have sorta synchronized dance moves, which about a dozen really enthusiastic fans (who look just like them) mirror in front of the stage.

For a little while, it’s a case of lesser evils. Saxophonics = no. White dreadlocked guy with acoustic guitar telling endless anecdotes in English = no. White bands playing “The Weight” = hell no. Our day is saved when we happen upon Cherry Boom, four young Taiwanese women enthusiastic playing really catchy pop punk. Despite quickly realizing that they’re actually playing to a backing track (waves, extra guitar parts, backing vocals), they’re really good musicians, have great stage presence, and judging by large numbers of people singing along, are a known entity here. When they ask, in English, if there are any foreigners in the audience, one poor guy raises his hand; they say something in Mandarin and the whole crowd roars with laughter. No idea what it was about, but making fun of foreigners only endears them to us more.

A little later, Sam is particularly taken with Fifitwo, a sort of younger version of Cherry Boom — three cute young Taiwanese women playing sloppier pop punk. He only loves them because they’re actually exactly the band that he was in when he was 14; he agrees that’s totally why and we move on.

The sight of an upright bass leads us both simultaneously to the same conclusion: Taiwanese rockabilly band! Before they even set up, we’ve planted ourselves in a good spot, quietly praying “please be awesome.” Four young guys with pompadours, matching bowling shirts and cuffed jeans, OliBand are exactly what you’d expect from a Taiwanese rockabilly band. Somehow, we take this as a great thing, when the bands left and right who are doing an entirely derivative take on Limp Bizkit are not a great thing. We’re perfectly okay with that contradiction. OliBand insert random English lyrics into their songs – “I like party time!” and “I know nothing about technology” – and while they’re not gonna set the world on fire, they’re entirely satisfying.

[Editor’s note: due to some totally not ill-advised late-night decision making involving drinking beer on the beach until 4 am, this blog post will be abbreviated while your intrepid correspondents head back to Spring Scream Day 3. Stay tuned for part 2 of this day, including the French, pantless NoMeansNo, why Charles Manson’s head is on the body of a panda bear, and why the pants-wearing dog needs a wallet chain. Stay tuned...]

Previously on day 3: Sam and I are at Spring Scream, the annual Taiwan indie music festival held in Kenting, on the southern tip of the island… We’ve just come from rockabilly act OliBand…

Fueled on Red Bull and vodka to balance out copious cheap beer, darkness falls as we wander about between all seven stages in a very small area. Rap rock continues to dominate – some of it quite competent, but being the hardcore snobs that we clearly are, we’re not interested.

Then we happen upon an unusual duo called Vialka — guitar and drums, the woman drumming is one of the most intense and insane live drummers we’ve ever seen. She sings with a wireless microphone, a sort of yelping, Yoko Ono-ish primal scream singing, accompanied by her (Canadian?) bandmate/husband; they’re like the French NoMeansNo, a connection that seems even stronger when we realize they play a song called “Only the Wrong Survive.”

Video for “Everywhere and Nowhere”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARcJSecwytw

We’re totally psyched about discovering this really exciting new band, and chat with drummer Marylise Frecheville after the show. They’re on tour seemingly forever – and have a young kid with them – including playing the upcoming Musique Actuelle festival in Victoriaville. Personal music satisfaction? Accomplished. Helpful in our understanding of Taiwanese music culture? Really not.

Our last priority of the night is to check out Kou Chou Ching, one of Taiwan’s most prominent hip-hop acts. Fronted by a pair of MCs with a DJ, they’ve got really tight flow, and interestingly, their music samples from a lot of traditional Chinese and aboriginal Taiwanese compositions, making them much more fascinating than other copycat hip-hop we’ve witnessed. They’re one of the few acts we’ve seen overall that seem to be coming from an authentically Taiwanese place, musically, and it’s really fascinating. Yet that’s exactly where the barrier is to us as foreigners – with both their music and most importantly their lyrics, they’re Taiwanese nationalists, highly political and controversial to a certain extent. (At one point, one of our guides tells us, they mention they’ve been nominated for an award in China, but that for political reasons they wouldn’t go get it even if they were to win.) Their push for Taiwanese independence from China appears to be the thrust of their lyrical message, but again, that context is lost to us a bit. Is that a dealbreaker in terms of an act like this coming to Canada? It’s a question we certainly ask ourselves – would the legacy of political, conscious rap in North America mean the same if its audience had no understanding not only of the context but even of the lyrics themselves? Regardless, Kou Chou Ching are on the cutting edge of new Taiwanese music and that’s very exciting, even if we couldn’t share in the enthusiasm around us for their nationalist message. (At one point their crowd call-and-response was to simply shout Taiwan – a reinforcement of nationalism that in itself is a political act for a country that remains in the political shadow of mainland China.)

Kou Chou Ching performing environmentalist song “Grey Coastlines” in NYC:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5aTm5r-EqA

With the last of our night’s musical obligations behind us, it’s back to the “night market” – essentially the main strip of Kenting stacked with street vendors. To walk the length of it would only take about 20 minutes – if it were empty, which it’s not. It’s here that some of the unusual differences between our cultures start to come out. Like the Taiwanese fondness for little dogs. Of all the dogs we’ve seen here, dogs (often poodles) under 15 pounds are treated essentially as fashion accessories. There have been plenty carried around different music festivals, they are often seen around booths and stalls, and medium sized dogs seem to be homeless for the most part, wandering like street dogs that are not uncommon in many parts of the world outside of pet-obsessed North America. This reached its pinnacle for me when I spotted this little guy in a street stall in the night market.

These shoes were made for kill-me-now.

You can’t see it in the photo, but on the other side of his tiny jeans, he’s actually sporting a tiny dog-sized wallet chain as well. In addition to the T-shirt, the jeans, and the tiny paw-embossed running shoes. He didn’t move when we approached, when I took a photo, or when we moved past him. He’s clearly overcome with depression. Wouldn’t you be if you were a dog?

Along the strip, there are a lot of skimpily dressed young women promoting various products – everything from vodka to scooters. (We actually found out today that at certain spots, when renting a scooter, you actually get a young woman as well, to act as a “guide” on your trip.) This particularly gargoyle-ish statue takes up the entire second floor of a store-front, where they seem to sell nothing more risqué than flip-flops and t-shirts.

I'm every woman, it's all in me.

Of course, there are the English translation issues that seem hilarious to us, especially when we’ve been drinking all day at a music festival. Like the Ecstasy Family! They’re happy every day!

We reach the end of the strip at a 7-11, which are everywhere. They’re a combination Kinkos, Wal-Mart, post office and liquor store, all in an area about ¼ what an average North America 7-11 looks like. You can pay your parking tickets, your taxes, buy booze, and they’re open 24 hours. We (natch) stop for more beers, and find two scantily clad women standing right beside the coolers basically preventing us from buying any other beer other than the brand they’ve been paid to promote. They even take it out of the fridge and put it in our hands. Since it’s a couple of Taiwanese dollars more expensive, we’re not sure about this. (Keep in mind, 30 Taiwanese dollars = 1 Canadian dollar, so we’re talking beer between $1.25 and $1.75, but we’re drunk and it’s the principle.) They finally convey to us that their beer is in fact on sale: buy 3, get 1 free. Done and done! And we mean done. To the beach! And when those beers are done, back to 7-11! (Beer girls are gone and so is all the beer they were promoting. Job well done, beer girls!) And back to the beach! At four a.m. the beach is abandoned, but the fireworks keep popping in the distance, back where the hippies are doing their hippie dance well into the night at Spring Scream. Godspeed hippies….

Day 4: The Absinth Hangover

Day four, and the town of Kenting seems to be in recovery mode from the weekend’s music festivities. The morning-after night market area is doing the walk of shame of garbage and really bad smells, and the music tourists have mostly returned to their lives. The day is overcast and drizzly, and since Sam and I are having our own slow start, the pace is perfectly okay with us. Over at Spring Scream there remain a handful of bands scheduled to play this afternoon, so we make our way over to survey the wreckage.

Before we get there, there is one notable spot that needs to be taken in — the site for Spring Scream, in the Kenting Forest national park, is on the tip of Taiwan, and the southernmost spot (at approximately 21 degrees N) is only a few hundred metres away. It’s the furthest south either Sam or I have been. Photo op!

Our primary goal at Spring Scream today is to get to chat with the festival organizers, American ex-patriots Wade Davis and Jimi Moe. We spot Jimi almost immediately – he looks like a man who’s spent several months organizing a massive festival, and then spent the previous night celebrating the accomplishment. He agrees to be interviewed on camera, but requests that he be able to sit down while we do it, since he looks like he can barely stand up. He calls his partner Wade over, and we finally get the perspective on the Taiwan music scene that we’ve been lacking until now. When they started Spring Scream 15 years ago, Kenting was not yet the popular tourist destination it is now; the “festival” as it were was nothing more than their own band, a couple of other friends’ bands, and their circle of friends keen to spend a weekend on the southern tip, amongst the white sandy beaches and ocean views. Over the next few years, word of mouth amongst both the Taiwanese and foreigner music communities spread and Spring Scream evolved fairly naturally.

They’re also helpful in their perspective on the evolution of Taiwan’s original “underground” music scene itself – once dominated by mainstream manufactured pop product and cover bands, when the Scream began, they tell us, you could count the number of independent bands writing their own music on one hand; now there are hundreds, and applications file in each year for bands wanting a spot at Spring Scream. Even their joy over this year’s successes helps us understand this evolution – there was a lot less endless on-stage tuning this year, they’re happy to relate. Bands were more skilled with their instruments. They knew how a stage set-up worked and were more professional in their approach. Their songwriting continues to improve year-to-year.

We’re dealing with a domestic music scene here that still counts tuning before going on stage, and understanding how a PA system works, to be notable developments amongst young bands – this is exactly the kind of perspective we’ve been missing, and it makes the accomplishment of what we witnessed the night before seem all the more remarkable. While we’ve been turning our noses at derivative rap-rock, Wade and Jimi are the beaming proud parents, watching a scene they’ve literally helped nurture from its infancy stand on its own two feet and declare its unabashed love of Linkin Park. Our music judgments seem like we’ve wandered into a high school battle of the bands and sniffed haughtily that none of them are ready to tour with Radiohead.

Though Wade and Jimi are enthusiastic and extremely helpful, they’re also exhausted, and at one point during our on-camera interview, Jimi simply falls backwards onto the grass, muttering that his absinth hangover is getting the best of him. 20 seconds later, he pops right back up again to answer another question. Sam and I hope it looks as funny on camera as it does in person.

In terms of final editorial product that will come out of this trip, I have notes, the blog and the advantage of some time to reflect when I return home. Sam, who’ll be turning this into video features for exclaim.ca, has been more worried in the last two days that he doesn’t yet have the footage that he needs – that he hasn’t yet found the narrative spine that will allow him to tell this story visually. Wade and Jimi are exactly what we need from that perspective, and the 20 minutes we spend with them make our whole day. We’re so excited, we do a “content high five.”

With the Wade and Jimi interview out of the way, Spring Scream is pretty much done. The stages are being dismantled behind them as we talk, and the remaining bands are playing on a makeshift stage nearer a campsite where some revelers have crashed for the weekend. We take the opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing around Kenting, despite the overcast skies. This part of Taiwan is fairly mountainous, but the ocean has created some interesting geographical features. In one area, the prevailing winds blow sand up the side of the mountain three months of the year, then the rainy season washes it all back down again, creating giant drifts of sand dunes along the coastline. In another spot, eroding limestone combined with rock above it has created a series of “slumping cliffs,” unusual step-like shelves all the way down to the ocean.

The rest of the day is spent prepping for our upcoming whirlwind trip to Taipei, when we’ll have a chance to interview some of the bands we’ve heard, plus a few more, including visits to a couple of key independent record stores. It’s a good low-key end to a pretty packed weekend.

So now’s as good a time as any to offer up the random photo selection we’ve started to accumulate.

The hotel buffet includes a “DIY hamburger” station, which naturally makes Sam a bit giddy.

Taiwanese culture is strictly anti-drugs, and these propaganda posters are everywhere. Sam and I delight in the illustration that not only includes pills, powder, joints and needles, but also a tube of model glue.

At Spring Scream, there were a lot of structures that included old water bottles as either decoration or construction, including this giant guitar. I’m standing beside it to give a sense of perspective.

For a different sense of perspective, here is me in the hallway outside our hotel room. No, I’m not standing on a box or even on my toes. Yes, my head is touching the ceiling.

Two things: first, corn dogs are extremely popular here, and are deep fried fresh to order, and second, Sam and I make excellent late night decisions.

Day 5: This is the best day. (Drink!)

Early start – at least for rock’n’roll types – to catch the bullet train from Kenting back to the northern end of the island, the capital and largest city, Taipei. Taiwan is about the size of Vancouver Island, but has a population almost equal to all of Canada. We arrive at the Taipei Railway Station – one of the largest in the world, a hub for all transportation in the city. The driver who’s been tasked with ferrying us around the city picks us up, drives a bit, turns right, drives a bit, turns right, drives a bit and turns right. I think to myself, “didn’t we just drive in a circle?” and indeed the front door of our hotel is right in front of the train station, about 100 yards away. We’re tough Canadian rock’n’roll journalists – we can walk you know…

We’ve got a jam-packed schedule for the day, starting with an immediate lunch with the Government Information Office – the organization that’s hoping to promote the Taiwanese domestic music scene, i.e., the people who’ve been kind enough to help bring us here. (Like FACTOR, but with better lunches.) We enjoy a delicious multi-course meal with some “indie music luminaries” from Taiwan, including a record label head who shares that the Taiwanese music scene faces many of the same issues in terms of CD sales as the rest of the world; one of the bands he’s working with has branched out into clothing and graphic design to help build the “brand” of their band, since making music selling CDs isn’t really an option here. Also, he kinda looks like the Taiwanese Jim Jarmusch, which is pretty awesome.

But the most notable part of the lunch (and a source of hilarity for us over the last few days) has been the suggestion that – given these are government officials, not rock types – appropriate lunch attire would be “business casual.” For me? No problem – just dress like I’m gonna play golf. For Sam this has been a source of some consternation for a while apparently, to the point that he actually looked up “business casual” on wikipedia before packing. The Blue Jays cap is his concession to his punk-rock-ness, and I mock him for not knowing how to tie a tie. (His dad tied one for him two years ago; he just slips it off and on as necessary.) He’s carrying a change of clothes because being seen in anything other than board shorts and a black band shirt would be crippling to his journalistic integrity. Loving mocking ensues. Photos will follow later.

After lunch, Sam changes back into his credibility uniform, we’re off to one of our most anticipated interviews yet, visiting White Wabbit records, by our understanding the heart of the Taiwanese indie music scene. White Wabbit is run by some folks in a band called Aphasia, an instrumental post-rock band that we heard before arriving and were keen to check out, but hadn’t had an opportunity since they weren’t playing this year’s Spring Scream. When we arrive at their offices and store, we’re immediately thrilled – although in a tiny, tiny space, we’ve found the Taiwanese Soundscapes. In fact, it could actually be Soundscapes! (For unfamiliar readers, Soundscapes is a very cool boutique record store in Toronto.) The entire store looks to be ripped from the pages of Exclaim! – Arts & Crafts records are all over the store, new offerings from the likes of Gentleman Reg, Frightened Rabbit, Joanna Newsom and many more line the walls. White Wabbit first brought Broken Social Scene and Stars to Taiwan. Our efforts to find “the cool kids” to get some perspective on the Taiwanese music scene have paid off!

First up, we interview KK, who helps run the White Wabbit label and the store, as well as playing bass in Aphasia. They started the store by taking over an abandoned washroom at nearby livehouse The Wall (a livehouse is what they call a music venue), and scouted bands by reading Pitchfork (and, it turns out, Exclaim!) and checking out bands’ MySpace pages. It’s clearly been a labour of love for them, and they seem as excited to see us as we are to meet them. Sky, who’s in a White Wabbit band called Windmill, tells us she emailed Arts & Crafts to tell them that we were coming by. She describes Arts & Crafts head Jeff Remedios as her “email lover” even though they’ve never met. The world gets smaller, our community gets bigger. For not the first time, Sam says “This is the best day” and we joke that we should have a drinking game where we all drink every time he says that.

Change of in-store location (gotta make those interviews look different somehow) and a break to show our new friends the Spookey Ruben/Feist video (they’re big Feist fans, natch) and we chat with Sky about her band Windmill, signed to the White Wabbit label. She’s interesting and cute, even though we don’t have a lot of context for her band; she describes their sound as “evoking the power of wind, the soft nature but the power to move a windmill.”

When we first interview KK, she doesn’t want to address questions about her band Aphasia, because the musical genius of the band (Brian, or Wu Yih-Chunn) is going to come by and we should talk to him. He’s a bit of a young indie godfather of the current Taiwanese youth scene – he helps run the label and the store, he’s the musical genius behind Aphasia, and he runs a recording studio nearby, where he records approximately ten bands a month. He’s also very politically-minded, and shows us newspaper clippings of himself as a young man at free speech protests here in Taiwan about 15 years ago. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the day’s political education, but the thought occurs to me that Aphasia, being an instrumental band, has a more political undercurrent than just liking post-rock – aphasia is a medical condition involving not being able to speak, having no voice. In a country that was under martial law of China just 20 years ago, being “voiceless” indeed has a much different political slant than anything we’re used to.

In discussions with Brian, we start to get a lot more political context for the situation here in Taiwan, which has had a significant impact on the development of independent music – indeed any form of original music – here in Taiwan. To help provide some context, I’m going to try to quickly outline some of these issues; keep in mind, I’m not an expert in Asian history, we’re gathering this information in bits and pieces through translation and many, many conversations over the last few days, and I haven’t had the opportunity to fact-check specifics. I’m trying to get an overview; please forgive any errors in the specific details.

My understanding is that when Chang Kai-Chek lost the civil war in China in 1949 to Mao Zedong, he – and his armies – fled to Taiwan, intending to regroup and return to mainland China to fight again. The cultural and ethnic makeup of Taiwan is a bit unusual – long ago it was a Portuguese colony and the island was called Formosa. (Some Taiwanese nationalists support returning to this name for their country.) But for most of the last century at least, it’s been considered part of mainland China – at least in the eyes of mainland China. There is also a significant aboriginal population here, made up of various nations/tribes and they have their own languages and dialects. The Taiwanese majority speaks Taiwanese, or had for years before the imposition of Chinese martial law; when China imposed martial law over Taiwan (which lasted until the end of the 1980s), they also imposed a Chinese education system, discouraging the teaching of Taiwanese and insisting on Mandarin education. Our hosts – who speak Taiwanese and Mandarin – have relayed some terrible stories of their parents or grandparents suffering persecution, imprisonment or death for being intellectuals (even elementary school principals) or being in positions of influence over Taiwanese youth. The rule of a Chinese minority over the Taiwanese and aboriginal majority has had a lasting impact on this country in ways that are felt significantly in the development of a Taiwanese youth culture, which wasn’t allowed freedom of speech until just the last 20 years.

One of the complications of that – and probably the primary issue for politically-minded bands in Taiwan – is Taiwanese independence. Taiwan is a democracy, and has had democratic elections for about 20 years, yet the first leader elected under that system was still significantly pro-China, and so is the current leader. Taiwan is not recognized as an independent country by the United Nations or most Western nations because China imposes its economic will on those who do recognize it. In the eyes of China, Taiwan is called the Republic of China; in the Olympics, the country competes as Chinese Taipei (a concession to the Chinese government to even allow Taiwan to compete separately in the Olympic games). Suddenly, the context of hip-hop group Kou Chou Ching encouraging their crowd to chant “Taiwan! Taiwan!” at Spring Scream a few days ago makes much more political sense to us, other than just an odd bit of national pride.

After our time at White Wabbit records, we head over to The Wall, one of the more prominent livehouses for original music in Taipei, where we’re meeting with one of the founding members of Kou Chou Ching. Again the political info-dump is kinda overwhelming. They’re considered essentially the leaders of Taiwan’s hip-hop scene, and in terms of both their understanding of the roots of hip-hop musically, and the political legacy of hip-hop, it’s easy to see why. Kou Chou Ching are kinda hardcore Taiwanese nationalists, and are trying to use hip-hop to both promote Taiwanese culture and raise political awareness. Their set-up when we saw them at Spring Scream was two MCs and a DJ – as well as an appearance by a dance troupe – but we find out that they usually have another member who plays a kind of Taiwanese flute as well, which is an interesting element to add to the music that makes it distinctly Taiwanese. (Note: Sam and I have been recording all of our interviews on camera for upcoming Exclaim! TV coverage, so I haven’t been taking interview notes. Thus my impressions are just that – the specifics of those interviews will come in a more formal form down the road.)

Also uniquely for Taiwanese hip-hop – which like many other music acts in Taiwan, try to emulate Western sounds – Kou Chou Ching is dedicated to using Taiwanese and aboriginal music as their backing tracks. Because of differences even in the Western and Eastern music scale, this has presented significant challenges to them, in terms of creating music that remains hip-hop but has its roots in Taiwanese music culture. Some other hip-hop groups here try to use a Western hip-hop template and simply throw in some Taiwanese elements on top, which is jarring due to the fundamentally different musical foundations. Kou Chou Ching have decided to take the more difficult route, but one that is truer to their nationalist politics.

That’s also been true in terms of career management. Almost all Taiwanese (this is our impression at least) speak Mandarin, and many speak Taiwanese or other dialects as well; given the challenges of breaking out as musicians on a global scale – especially in a music so lyrically oriented as hip-hop – the most obvious markets outside of Taiwan are Asian ones: Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Phillipines, and oh yeah, that Mandarin-speaking billion-person music market known as mainland China. When we saw them at Spring Scream, they commented that they had been nominated for a music award in China, but they weren’t going to go even if they won. At the time, we took it as a politically-minded sort of “as Taiwanese nationalists, we won’t acknowledge this award” but – like everything else in Taiwan – it’s more complicated than that.

In order for a Taiwanese citizen to get a visa to visit China, they have to sign a document that essentially says they acknowledge that Taiwan is not an independent country and that they are in fact Chinese citizens. And yet, when they do enter the country (having signed this acknowledgment) they’re still process as foreign tourists, not as Chinese citizens. For an act like Kou Chou Ching, this obviously has some significant repercussions beyond just being a statement of political ideology.

During the interview, we are reminded that Taiwan was under martial law just 20 years ago. Freedom of speech and expression was repressed. Bands writing and performing original music was impossible. The only Taiwanese music was manufactured pop bands and cover bands. There’s no legacy amongst Taiwanese youth (for several generations) to encourage speaking their minds, expressing themselves or their point of view, and fostering a sense of creativity. The judgments of our first two days of experiencing Taiwanese music – with our music snob filters in full force – have changed significantly. This is not a culture that maybe doesn’t have good music taste, or doesn’t have interesting and creative ideas to offer – this is a country that has never been allowed to have a youth culture at all, much less encouraged an original music scene to express it. That there are so many original bands now, that they are growing and exploring and learning so quickly, now seems like an amazing accomplishment and it puts the efforts and the accomplishments of the 200 bands that played Spring Scream (was that really just a few days ago?) into a completely different perspective.

The Kou Chou Ching interview ends on a bit of a chilling note when our subject points out that if he were to give an interview like this – or even express ideas like this – just 20 years ago, he would “disappear” almost immediately, to prison or to immediate execution. And given that he’s given this interview to media from the West, there’s a good chance that Sam and I would meet the same fate. It’s a chilling reminder of a reality that is completely unknown to us, and one that puts so much of what we’ve taken for granted in perspective. Our brains are increasingly full of knowledge and the overview we’ll need to put this all in perspective is really starting to come together. This is the best day. (Drink!)

Next up, we get an opportunity to talk to Double X, described to us as a “punk pioneer,” one who’s been making original music in Taiwan for almost 20 years, and whose first album was banned and pulled from shelves. Like so many experiences in this fascinating country, it will not turn out to be what we expect it to be… stay tuned.

Day 5, Part 2

Previously in our Taiwan adventures… Sam and I are in Taipei to interview independent Taiwanese musicians. It’s our first day in Taipei after several days at music festivals in the south, and our political perspective has certainly been exploded by what we’ve recently learned. We’re meeting musicians at The Wall – one of the only “livehouses” that hosts bands that play original music. We just finished speaking to a member of hip-hop group Kou Chou Ching, and are now scheduled to sit down with Double X, described to us as a “punk pioneer” who had his first album banned in Taiwan.

Double XX has been a band with various members over the years, but its constant has been Sissy, who greets us affably in English – he spent some time in North America after his mandatory military service; he can’t quite recall when that was, but about 20 years ago. The context Sam and I have been given for him is that his music has continued to evolve since he first began as one of the very first composers of original music in the country, and that his sound has changed significantly since it began. We were given a few recent songs he’d done, a sound that’s somewhat gothic oriented, and more personal-sounding – not what we would deem “punk.”

When we sit down with him to hear his story, it becomes quickly apparent that he was never a “punk” from a musical or social standpoint; he’s not particularly interested in politics and has never written about social issues in his music. His has been a personal exploration throughout his career. His first album was a concept album about life and death – one person’s life from beginning to end – and included some songs about sex. He was, he tells us, the first Taiwanese musician to write about sex, and it was this personal perspective that brought him to the attention of a then-censorship-prone Taiwanese government. He called that first album – in Mandarin – “Put Myself Out”; the combination of that title, and songs about sex, got spun in the mainstream media that he was prone to personal exposure in ways that he never intended. The government, he tells us, interpreted “Put Myself Out” that he was going to expose himself – “to pull my dick out,” he tells us – instead of his intent, which was to expose himself metaphorically in song, to put himself out emotionally. Despite the ban, he was able to sell some CDs and although he doesn’t have any copies himself any more, fans still occasionally approach him to sign one of these banned CDs – a real collector’s item for Taiwanese indie music historians.

During his on-camera interview, Sissy wore a Lone Ranger style mask, and explained to us that he always wears the mask in performance in order to distinguish his identity as a person from his performance identity as Double X. He also told us that the band were called Double X initially as a stand-in name – as his identity evolved, he said, it was always his intention to change the name to reflect changing directions in his music; Double X was just a place-holder name for new ones to come, but as he built his reputation and Double X became more tied to his musical identity, it just became the name he’d use. The mask itself was also an evolution – he used to wear full face make-up for performances, but sweat and constant make-up application became more of a burden and he switched to just using the mask.

His music, since the banning of his first CD, has remained an emotional and personal expression and one aspect that surprised us was that he takes all things as an expression of god – of a higher calling. He would point skyward when mentioning god, which wouldn’t be all that unusual except in this context, in a country that is predominantly Buddhist (Buddhists don’t believe in a higher power or supreme being). Fascinating guy, and yet another unexpected piece in our ongoing understanding of the evolution of the independent music scene in this country.

With those interviews in the can, we head off for dinner at a local Japanese restaurant, one of the more famous and popular spots in Taipei. A traditional Japanese BBQ restaurant, each table has a barbeque pit in the centre of it, full of hot charcoal. You order a variety of meats – and it seemed to be almost exclusively a meat-centred restaurant – and then grill them right at the table. Our enthusiastic waiter offered to bring us an interesting selection of meats to showcase to us, the Western visitors; that turned out to include beef tongue, chicken hearts, livers and gizzards, pork bellies, scallops and shrimp. As had been our experience at almost every meal we’ve eaten, there’s way too much food brought to the table and long after Sam and I would’ve admitted defeat, more plates of raw meat kept arriving and we started to feel overwhelmed. The meat sweats is how we described the experience. Naturally, Sam declares that this is the best day. (Drink!)

There were a couple of other unusual aspects to this Japanese dining experience. Lining the walls throughout the restaurant are photos of patrons kissing, with notes of date and who the subjects are. Turns out that one of the characteristics of this restaurant is to encourage patrons to kiss for at least ten seconds (while the whole restaurant counts down) – doing so wins you a free plate of meat! (Sam and I don’t bother – there’s been no shortage of meat at our table, and another plate probably would’ve done us in.) The other tradition is that each night at 8 pm, those with something to celebrate are invited to “toast” whatever anniversary they have – if everyone at the table finishes the drink they’re toasting with, the table gets a free round of drinks. As a result, everyone tries to get in the doors of the place by 6:30 or 7, then hangs around at their table, saving the last inch or so in whatever their drinking, to make it easier to drain their drinks on cue and get a free round. We toast Exclaim!’s 18th anniversary, but with items still on our agenda, we don’t actually stick around for another round. And besides, the meat sweats are quickly leading to a meat nap.

But sleep isn’t on the agenda quite yet. Having visited White Wabbit records earlier in the day – see “Day 5, part 1” – we’re keen to get an opportunity to see instrumental band Aphasia play some music. They’re practicing tonight at the studio that Brian runs, and we’ve been invited to come by. The studio, located in a small-ish looking basement, is both studio and rehearsal space for the band; when we arrive, they’re pretty close to wrapping up their work, but they play a couple of tunes for us while Sam shoots live footage to give a sense of their performance. They sound great, and we encourage our hosts to consider them for a spot at this summer’s TaiwanFest – their sound, their story and their connections to Arts & Crafts make them a no-brainer for us as a band that could find an enthusiastic audience here.

Finally, we’re done for what has been a really long day – one that began in the southern city of Kenting, before bullet-training to Taipei. We still haven’t checked into our hotel (our rooms weren’t ready when we arrived). When we do finally get our rooms, Sam and I get a bit of a shock – we’ve been booked into executive suites at one of the more prominent hotels in Taipei – with a view of the Taipei railway station from our rooms. Full suites with a living room and bedroom – even the bathroom is the size of what we probably thought a typical hotel room would be in this country. We feel super-important. I also feel super exhausted. Sam heads out into the Taipei night to explore, while I just fall into bed. Tomorrow we have another full line-up of interviews – talking to indie label A Good Idea, whose bands were featured at last year’s TaiwanFest in Toronto and Vancouver, plus livehouse founder Geddy Lin, long-standing indie band 1976, Cherryboom, the all-girl pop punk band we liked at Spring Scream, an interview and performance with Matzka, an aboriginal reggae band, and the one that Sam’s excited about, an interview with Taiwan’s most internationally successful independent band, Freddy Lin of metal group Cthonic. Plus Sam wants to get a tattoo – are we going to fit that in? Stay tuned.

Previously in Taiwan: After several days at a music festival in southern Taiwan, Sam and I have come to Taipei to interview bands and independent labels working in the northern capital of Taipei. The political context and pioneering drive of these bands have continued to reshape our impressions of this country and its music scene on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

Waking up in Taipei for the first time, we again have a busy schedule of interviews on tap, but first, a few impressions of the city. One of the first comments we make to each other is that it looks like Blade Runner – street markets and food stalls are extremely common here, designed not only for walk-up traffic but also as pseudo drive-throughs for the city’s ubiquitous mopeds. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in Taiwan – at least old enough to reach the handlebars – who doesn’t drive one, and the moped parking is crazier than for cars in the city.

There's another lane of traffic to the right.

It’s also a remarkably clean city; despite the smog, which is quite bad, the streets appear spotless. But traffic is a completely different matter here – driving in this city is truly a daredevil activity. After only a few minutes, Sam and I stop flinching and covering our eyes at every near-accident that appears imminent, and accept that the driving culture simply encourages everyone to pick their way through any tiny opening. Major streets are quite broad; at the average traffic stop, it’s not uncommon (in what we’d consider three lanes of traffic) so see at least three lanes of cars, plus an army of mopeds 20-wide and innumerably deep. Mopeds weave in and out amongst the cars constantly, and car and moped horns are used to communicate a variety of intentions – from “hey, I’m driving here” to “move because I’m about to run over you” to “hey, howya doin?”

One of the more surprising moments comes when we spot an actual Taiwanese traffic cop – a hapless-seeming man in fluorescent vest and orange flashlight, who is not only trying to bring order to this seeming madness, but finds himself constantly dodging cars and mopeds himself as they stream around him in the endless flow of go-anywhere traffic.

We’re even more shocked when one of our hosts tells us that in fact these traffic cops are volunteers, not paid cops. When we express our disbelief at this notion, our host shrugs and offers that Taiwanese people – having been pushed around and told what to do for so many years – are happy for the opportunity to tell other people where to go.

Our first stop of the day is to check up on the prospects of Sam’s tattoo. He’s keen to get a permanent memento of his time here, and has tracked down one of Taiwan’s top indie tattoo artists. We finally find his shop down a small side street of what looks like a pretty hip(ster) neighbourhood, but the artist himself is nowhere to be found. He’s on the rock’n’roll schedule that Sam and I would usually be on. He finally arrives (by moped of course) and at first doesn’t seem too impressed to have foreigners demanding his artistic expertise on a very tight schedule. But when he realizes that Sam has tracked him down specifically, he’s flattered; when we start to discover some music commonalities as well, then our cultural barriers start to dissolve. Sam has an outline of what he’s looking for, but wants the artist to put his spin on it. The artist says he’ll have to work out what it’ll look like and how long it will take and get back to us later in the day.

What has been truly amazing – other than the learning experiences about Taiwan’s independent music scene – has been the food. For lunch, we’re heading off to enjoy what have been described to us as “the best dumplings on earth.” To start, this dumpling house has a pretty awesome mascot greeting us outside.

Both Sam and I consider ourselves no rookies to the dumpling game, but it becomes immediately clear we’re dealing with some advanced dumpling technology here. What we’re served are essentially soup hot-pocket dumplings – cooked with meat and soup inside the dumpling, the balance between dough and meat portion and soup must be exactly precise. If the dough is too thick, the meat inside won’t cook sufficiently; if it’s too thin, it will break and spill soup everywhere. And as we can clearly see – since the kitchen is visible from the dining area through huge plate glass windows – is that these are each being made by hand by what looks like an army of white coat-clad dumpling technologists.

The process: take the dumpling with your chopsticks from the tiny top-knot built in, dip it in your dish of soy sauce, vinegar and ginger, then put it on your spoon and poke a hole in it to let the hot soup out. If you were to simply pop it in your mouth, you’d get an explosion of hot soup and that would be less fun. They truly are the best dumplings on earth.

After lunch, we are off to the headquarters – read: small apartment – of hobby indie label A Good Day, who had one of their bands featured in Canada at last year’s TaiwanFest. They’re friendly folks who seem to fit the mould of indie labels here: a community of like-minded friends who play on and put out each other’s music. We do the interview out on their seventh floor balcony, which is decorated with hand-painted flags. What stands out is that their label seems more like a collective of friends; label business is often conducted at barbeques out here on the balcony, and they point out that the graffiti that covers one wall was all done with the charcoal left over from those barbeques.

One of their bands, Nylas, is also here; the folkie duo who describe their own music as “easy listening,” although I suspect that description doesn’t mesh with what we would deem easy listening. They played last year’s TaiwanFest – which takes place each summer in August – an experience that they primarily characterize as “cold.” As for their memories of playing at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, they remember the lake, and that the audience consisted primarily of seagulls.

We actually have an unusual two-hour break between interviews, so we grab the opportunity to actually do something touristy while we’re here – we head to Taipei 101, up until recently the world’s tallest office building. (It was only recently surpassed by a building in Malaysia; this is not to be confused with the CN Tower being the world’s tallest free-standing structure, and recently surpassed by a building in Dubai.)

When we head inside, we’re greeted everywhere by the mascot for Taipei 101, called Damper Baby. We’re first struck by the fact that Damper Baby has exactly the same pose and facial expression that Sam uses in every single one of his photographs:

For example, there’s the “Sam in business casual pretending this is his fancy car.”

He even uses the same pose when he’s taking self-portraits.

When you line up to go to the top of the building, all the patrons have their photos taken, and they are immediately displayed on screens while you wait for the elevators – the idea is that you’ll buy a copy for yourself at the top. Two of our hosts, Charlie and Jessica (who are not by nature exuberant people), decided to do their own Sam pose tribute – all the more hilarious to us for how out of character it seemed.

At the top of Taipei 101, we find out that the damper that named the baby is a giant ball of concrete suspended on shocks and cables that acts as a shock absorbing system for the building in this city with a history of earthquakes. (Um, yikes.) We’re handed handsets with a keypad; corresponding numbers are posted at different banks of windows, where you’re informed of points of interest below. The four beast mountains for example, which are said to resemble a tiger, a lion, an elephant and the other one, are supposed to be one of the most perfect spots on earth from a feng shui perspective. Or the parks where walking and exercising can be enjoyably pleasant. (The literalness of the Chinese to English translation is almost as fun as the fact that all 15 spots are scored with elevator music in a different genre, from J-pop to country.) Oddly, the commentary points out several mansions that have been built by some of Taiwan’s richest citizens.

Another day, and more shades are added to our understanding of this fascinating country’s complexities. Most of the crowds at Taipei 101 are Chinese tour groups, led by guides holding aloft flags adorned with corporate logos. Driving through the city, you notice more signs of conspicuous wealth than you might back home. The cost of living is relatively low and – while our experience and exposure has been extremely limited – we’ve seen very few signs of obvious poverty. This prosperity is almost entirely because of China, because Taiwan has long been used as isolationist China’s gateway to the rest of the Western world. The issues of Taiwanese independence that were raised in yesterday’s interviews are today tempered by the complexity of the relationship between China and Taiwan – there are plenty of very material reasons for Taiwanese citizens to not rock the boat. That Taiwan is a democracy that elects a pro-China Prime Minister becomes a rather perfect expression of this intertwined complexity.

Today, politics will be left aside for rock’n’roll. We head to one of Taiwan’s first livehouses for bands playing original music, founded by Geddy Lin. A musician himself who spent time in California’s fusion jazz scene, he founded Riverside (now a label as well as venue) in large measure so that he’d have someplace to play himself. On one side of the venue hang posters of Hendrix, Cobain, Björk and Madonna. On the opposite wall are jazz greats Dizzy, Miles, Bird and Dexter Gordon. Many nights in the venue’s early days, he recalls, there would be more people on stage than in the audience. And although there’s a well-appointed bar in the corner, one aspect of even the most underground music scenes here that’s surprised us is that bars in livehouses lose money. Rock’n’roll is not an activity that’s accompanied by drinking here, and at most of the shows we’ve been to, Sam and I have been the only ones with a beer in hand.

Riverside – and other livehouses like it, including a second, much larger Riverside club that recently opened – are starting to thrive in this city, because shows cost more than CDs here. Even in a scene as young as this one, fans expect to pay a significant fee for live music. There may only be five or six livehouses in all of Taipei for these bands, but they’re growing, not closing.

After Geddy Lin, we chat with one of the bands on his label, 1976. Named for the year they were all born, they’re one of the longest-standing original bands in the country. They dive on the last copy of Exclaim! I have with me, and their demeanour during our interview suggests they’re prepared for the rock’n’roll press that’s come calling. It’s one of the interesting realizations we’ve come to as we talk to more bands here – there’s no tradition of any music press in this country. There are no music magazines, and larger entertainment media seem to focus more on gossip involving musicians than anything about music itself. Several of our interview subjects comment on how interesting it is for them to actually talk about their music to journalists. For Sam and I, it makes our jobs easier because even though we’re going into many of these circumstances with a minimal amount of information and in some cases no music context at all, we can ask the most basic questions because no one has prepared a bored, stock answer because literally no one has ever asked them about their music influences before. For 1976, it’s grunge and Britpop, they happily proclaim. They also tell us that – despite their relatively advanced ages (in their view) – they still really want to be rock stars.

During a break, I chat with a couple of 1976 members who speak a little English, and they’re keen to talk sports, which they’re surprisingly up-to-date on. They comment to me about Chris Bosh’s facial injury, which had just happened and I’d only read about online that morning. They ask how the Jays are going to do this year without Roy Halladay, and if Vernon Wells can finally live up to his potential. They don’t know anything about the Leafs.

If 1976 want to be rock stars, our next subjects already are – at least in their minds. Cherryboom are the band we saw back at Spring Scream on our second night in the country (wow, that seems like about two weeks ago at this point); the all-girl pop-punk band arrive before us dressed like they’re about to take the stage (ripped tights, big boots, style and attitude). And when we ask them to introduce themselves, they do so with practiced precision, topping it with an in-unison “and we’re Cherryboom.” They turn out to be charming and funny in our interview too – telling us they like to write songs dissing their boyfriends because they can, since boys doing likewise would be un-gentlemanly. The toughest part about being in an all-girl band is that the gear is heavy and guitars just aren’t built for their small hands, but they don’t feel like there are any barriers to getting gigs or advancing musically. There aren’t more female musicians in Taiwan, they think, because girls are unwilling to sacrifice their soft hands to the hours of practice it takes to attain proficiency with an instrument.

One of the oddities about their performance was the fact that they play to a backing track, despite having all the instrumental chops to make it unnecessary. When we ask, they tell us that they want to sound pretty and girly, and that the backing track provides sounds they simply can’t replicate live. I’m tempted to try and explain to them that audiences might think it’s a crutch to possibly hide some deficiencies on their part, but who the hell am I?

When we’re done the interview, Cherryboom present us with copies of their CDs, whip out a silver sharpie, and (without asking) proclaim that they’ll all sign them for us, so we’ll have their autographs. Love them.

With a relatively tight schedule, our hosts opt to stop at a nearby pizza place that has a cat-themed name I can’t remember, just the cat that wanders around the restaurant. Next up is Matzka, an aboriginal reggae band playing nearby at one of the newest livehouses in Taipei. Aboriginal history has been one of the more challenging to get a handle on for us. An aboriginal population of various tribes or nations makes up a relatively significant minority in Taiwan. Their languages and culture are separate from Taiwanese people of mostly Chinese descent, but who speak a long-standing Taiwanese language that is the second-most spoken here. Of course Mandarin dominates the country, since it’s been taught almost exclusively in schools for many years.

One of the issues for Matzka is to try to reclaim their own aboriginal language and history and celebrate it with music strongly influenced by reggae. They point to many commonalities with Jamaica – island nation, hot humid weather, etc. – and claim that there’s a natural bond between them. When I point out that Taiwan as a society is vehemently anti drug, including marijuana and Jamaica is, um, not, their lead singer suggests that the Taiwanese have beetlenut culture and that I should try it. That goes on the list for the next time I’m here.

When we see them play after the interview, we find that in fact reggae matches beautifully with their aboriginal singing, with subtle local music accents that make it a really unusual but cool fusion. Alas, we can’t stay and enjoy it (along with the really tasty aboriginal rice wine we’re served) because we’ve landed a last minute interview with Taiwan’s biggest independent music export.

Cthonic are a Taiwanese black metal band who’ve toured North America with Ozzfest, played the Wacken festival in Germany, and are one of the most successful bands in their mother country (as singer Freddy Lim refers to Taiwan). They’ve been politically outspoken and appeared at pro-independence rallies in the country, but when we sit down with Lim – as a team of people works behind him in a small office just outside livehouse The Wall – he wants to talk about the Taiwanese indie music scene. After outlining the successes he’s had with his band – which he attributes to being skilled enough, and prepared enough to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves – he starts taking some of his fellow countrymen to task for not having their shit together. They don’t act professionally sometimes, he says of the scene he witnesses. And they’ve got stars in their eyes when it comes to China – obviously the largest music market for anyone in Asia. He knew that China isn’t ready for death metal so he never considered trying to break that market – he went to Fuji Rocks (Japan’s largest music festival) and to metal fests in Europe and the U.S. Similarly, bands playing non-traditional original music won’t find welcome ears in China either, a reality he thinks many fail to accept.

Develop a home audience, he says. I point out to him that Taiwan has the same population as Canada, and he counters with the fact that the bullet train runs the length of the country in less than two hours. Domestic touring doesn’t even require touring here – you can be home in bed every night, yet in his opinion, no one is developing a music market for young people in Taiwan’s many smaller towns and communities. Once again, another aspect of this fascinating scene is revealed.

Sam also asks questions about metal.

Stay tuned for our final day, including Sam’s tattoo odyssey, famous actors and Taiwan’s most significant pioneering punks. Plus, we finally eat a vegetable!

Waking on our final day in Taiwan, I realize that I have finally completely readjusted my sleep schedule to the opposite side of the world – just in time to get on a plane home this afternoon. I’m not sure that Sam ever adjusted his schedule – with a rock’n’roll life back home and a business-and-meetings schedule here, it’s possible that he’s actually on exactly the same clock as always. That rock’n’roll schedule is likely to have more of an impact on someone else on this morning – namely, the tattoo artist that we yesterday negotiated to make time for Sam while we’re here. That time is now – 8 a.m. on a Thursday morning. It’s also Sam’s first independent adventure in Taipei – getting up on his own and taking a cab across the complicated city. As Sam reports to us later, a 15 minute cab ride through Taipei’s crazy-making traffic cost only a few dollars, and he and the tattoo shop folks bond over Metallica before Sam introduces them to the wonders of Voivod. Interestingly, almost all the music consumption at the tattoo shop is via YouTube, rather than any other online playlist, iTunes or bit torrents.

Sam’s dedication to inky mementos means I’m on my own for the first couple of interviews of the day, with indie label Wonder Music and then with a member of Totem, one of the bands on Wonder. Each glimpse into the music scene here reveals different facets, focuses and interests: in Wonder Music’s case, its owner and founder is a recording engineer who came from the mainstream, major label system here. His perspective is that independent bands suffer in the Taiwanese market simply because of quality – particularly of sound. When bands sound like crap, he relates, consumers assume they are crap, so it’s his goal to raise the recording standard for Taiwan’s indie music community. Part of his plan for doing so is to give them a good place to rehearse and record – indeed, we conduct the interview in a large, modern-looking studio that also serves as a rehearsal space for the label’s bands. Such simple things – a space to rehearse, an opportunity to record rehearsals as a means of capturing in-the-moment creativity – are key to the development of this scene and are a point of focus for many people who are trying to build a foundation for a Taiwanese independent scene.

One of the goals for Wonder Music is to build a community around its artists, and as a result, recruiting bands becomes not just an exercise in scouting musicians, but also in matching personality traits and perspectives. He’d rather have a couple of bands with very little in common musically, but who share a personal bond, than to build a coherent roster that will help create a musical identity for the label. Since the studio also acts as a rehearsal space, he encourages members from different bands to hang out and jam, to feed off of each others’ creativity. It’s another interesting perspective.

To see how that works in the practical, I next chat with the front-man and songwriter from Totem, whose name is in my notes somewhere. Turns out that Totem are actually on hiatus this year, but that’s hasn’t slowed him down – he’s fronting two other bands as well, and is the primary songwriter for all of them. He’s a good-looking aboriginal guy, but it took him a while – and some apparent success – before he even started fronting his own bands, singing his own songs. When he was 17 years old, he started writing songs for other people to sing – mostly mainstream pop type stuff given to artists to sing on Taiwanese song and performer contests, the equivalent of Taiwan Idol or, more appropriately, the Eurovision song contests. He enjoyed some success with these endeavours before finally emerging to front his own bands and forge his own musical path. Now writing songs for three different bands (including Totem), it’s clear that being prolific isn’t any problem for him.

And that’s not his only job either – I find out he’s also a popular actor in Taiwanese TV and films. When I ask if this kind of exposure has helped his music career, if one feeds the other, he comments that while all the fans of his music are familiar with his acting career, no one who admires him as an actor has any idea about his music. So those communities aren’t co-mingling – how about the music community being built here around the Wonder Music label? He hedges before finally revealing that, while he likes all the other musicians on the label as people, he doesn’t really go out to see their gigs, and doesn’t involve himself in jams or other inter-creative pursuits. He’s pretty focused on his own path as an artist and songwriter.

As we count down our final hours in Taiwan, we pick up Sam from the tattoo shop, where apparently a love of thrash metal has overcome all language barriers. Then it’s off to our final interview before departing – one that Sam has been particularly keen to track down after researching the evolution of the Taiwanese punk scene. We’re sitting down with the main guy behind LTK – one of Taiwan’s original punk bands, who are still a going concern. (In another small-world connection, LTK’s latest album is currently underway at the studio owned by Aphasia’s Brian, co-owner of White Wabbit Records, whom we’d met a couple of days before.)

LTK (which stands for Loh Tsui Kweh Commune), started out in true punk tradition – as a means to a political end, in terms of fighting for freedom of speech, against martial law, and in favour of Taiwanese independence. The band formed to specifically play at protests – to offer a musical element to political rallies – and has continued doing so in the ensuing 20 years. In fact, LTK have no real musical aspirations beyond their political agendas, and have no illusions that they would find any success on musical terms beyond spreading that message.

Their first album, recorded nearly 20 years ago, was banned in Taiwan – and, as their front-man tells us – that was the point. Because of their political perspective and their profile amongst those who are concerned with who’s speaking out against the government, there was no doubt in their minds that their recordings would be banned regardless of their content or musical worth. So LTK did the most punk thing they could think of: they made an album that was sure to get banned, since that was a given anyway, and put every radical political thought – as well as a healthy supply of swearwords and other taboos – into the album. That it was banned was inevitable; that LTK did it by expanding their political scope rather than shrinking from the challenge is admirable and helped solidify their reputation in Taiwan’s underground scene.

With that final interview in the bag, we’re up for one last glorious food adventure in this, a most remarkable food culture. But after a week of night market corn dogs, seafood oddities and particularly the Japanese bbq meat sweats of the night before, our hosts are wisely taking us to one of Taiwan’s best vegetarian restaurants. Once again, our hosts order up a table-groaning amount of food – most of which I can’t remember the details of – and the conversation is mostly trying to process the craziness that’s occurred in the last seven days, particularly from the beginnings of the Spring Wave and Spring Scream festivals. Our expectations have been blown apart by just two-and-a-half days in Taipei, and Sam and I excited relate to our hosts that from our point of view, this adventure is no longer about the music here. (I’m not sure how that sits with them, since exploring the music here was the point of the trip.) Instead, Sam and I relate that what we’ve found is in fact something we’ve only read about, and never seen in our time as music fans: the beginnings, the spark, of a true musical revolution – the birthplace of “punk,” as it were, for Taiwan’s musical underground. It’s not about whether or not all the bands we’ve seen, or talked to, or heard about are awesome, whether or not they can break into the North American or European music scene, or whether they’re commercially viable or exportable. It’s about the moment of creation that these bands are building – they’re forging new ground for the bands that follow them, but also are literally creating a sense of Taiwanese youth culture with every gig they play and every fan they encourage to pick up an instrument. They’re helping give voice to a generation of young people, an opportunity that was denied to their parents and their grandparents. They are finding a voice in a culture that has, for a very long time, been voiceless from the point of view of young people. And we’re here. We’re witnessing and trying to chronicle that moment of explosion. The whole experience has been a high that we can barely imagine and that will take us a long time to process.

Before parting with our hosts – and likewise with this blog (for now) – we offer our thank yous and goodbyes, which I’d like to also do here. We were accompanied, every day for a week, by three members of the Asian-Canadian Special Events Association, the Vancouver-based organization responsible for the TaiwanFest events: Managing Director Charlie Wu, Communications Manager Sherry Wang, and Artistic and Creative Director Jessica Sung. (For the first few days, we were joined by Sherry’s husband Thomas, who’d left a few days earlier to do some touring in Hong Kong and Beijing.)

Charlie Wu is the person responsible for bringing us to Taiwan – he first approached Exclaim! about helping to bridge the gap between the more traditional elements offered at TaiwanFest and the country’s burgeoning indie music community. While my first impressions of Charlie were that he had little idea what he was getting into by inviting a couple of obnoxious music snobs into this world; by the end, we came to realize that Charlie has a bit of a radical side of his own. It’s clear that he loves his birthplace – we drove through his hometown on the bullet train but didn’t get a chance to stop – but also that he’s fighting his own cultural battles in more formal settings. For example, not everyone in the Chinese Canadian community is open to the idea of TaiwanFest at all, and object to it on principle, arguing it should be deemed ChinaFest and open its cultural worldview to the entirety of China. But he’s also committed to making TaiwanFest into a reflection of Taiwan’s emerging culture, not an historical museum piece examining history and the most exportable cultural tropes of Asian culture. “You can always entertain white people with dancing dragons,” he tells us, but that isn’t a reflection of Taiwan today. His commitment to encouraging a proper reflection of contemporary Taiwan – including the potentially risky move of letting Exclaim! help shape the content of the festival, from an underground music perspective – could risk the more conservative elements of the Asian-Canadian community who might want to only see a misty, romanticized version of the culture they remember, not some loud, potentially obnoxious rock or hip-hop by upstart youth.

Sherry Wang was probably most in need of sleep after spending a week with us. She was our primary translator throughout our trip, including for all of our interviews; while we were trying to catch up to what was happening musically, she grappled with our haphazard journalistic “style” and the ways in which we – and our musician subjects – talked about work. Music nerd speak is its own language in any culture, and Sherry tackled the heavy lifting of comprehending, and then translating, that nerd speak in two different directions.

Jessica Sung was the unsung hero of the trip, the quiet one who was the secret mastermind behind the smooth organization. She was the keeper of the schedule and the one who accommodated our every request. When we discovered White Wabbit Records – and then insisted that it be first on our interview agenda, as a key to unlocking the indie scene in Taipei – she got that request on the schedule. When we realized that Cthonic – Taiwan’s most successful indie export to the west, but as a death metal band, nowhere near appropriate for TaiwanFest – was in town, Jessica got that on the agenda. Shooting Aphasia in their recording studio, tracking down LTK, even getting Sam’s tattoo into the packed schedule, Jessica made it all happen. And did so without stress or panic or seemingly any complications.

Our hosts are staying in Taipei for another week or two – in fact, straight from lunch, they are shifting gears from indie rock to Taiwan’s fashion world – and so Sam and I are headed to the airport on our own. (The Taipei airport is actually about an hour’s drive south of the city.) Since Taiwan and Toronto are exactly 12 hours apart – with a 14-hour flight – we’ll depart late Thursday afternoon in Taiwan and arrive Thursday evening in Toronto. We wander the entirely tricked-out Taipei airport – including our requisite shots of the immigration beagle we were so struck by on our way in.

Here we hatch our brilliant plan to readjust our systems back to North American time – we’ll simply stay awake for the entire flight, land in Toronto in the evening, and collapse exhausted into bed, sleep through it and wake up refreshed Friday morning in Toronto. After about 2 hours on the plane, Sam and I are dead asleep. When we awake, we discover we’ve slept about 9.5 hours. Brilliant plan, but our execution has really sucked. With less than two hours left before we land, both Sam and I fire up Nic Cage film National Treasure (the original), which neither one of us have seen. When we’re shut down due to landing procedures, etc., we’re both only halfway through the movie, which we’ve had a total of 28 hours of in-flight opportunity to watch. So not only are our systems (and my back) completely screwed up, now we have to rent National Treasure this week as well, just to find out how it ends.